System Restore with file back up

I have a gateway laptop running on Vista. I believe its been inficted with a virus or some other malicious program. When I turn the laptop on it boots on as normal. The problem is when it gets to what should be the windows desktop its a blank, balck screen, nothing visible, no desktop icons just my mouse's cursor. I was thinking of running sytem restore with file back-up to get it working again but afraid of losing all the photos I had stored. Any suggestions?

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